Stand and Be Counted: A Revealing History of Our Times Through the Eyes of the Artists Who Helped Change Our World by David Crosby

Author:David Crosby
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Music, General
ISBN: 9780062515742
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2000-02-01T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The

Antinuclear Crusade:

'We Almost Lost Detroit

The reason music works so well to fuel a popular movement is that you don't

need everybody's permission to make music, and everybody recognizes the

value of a really good song.

Jackson Browne Both the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement grew out of

problems that got right up in our faces every day and stayed there until we

dealt with them. We couldn't ignore lunch counters and fire hoses and Rosa

Parks and Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman, any more than we could deny

seeing body counts and secret bombings, My Lai or Kent State. We had to

deal with them as a country and, painful as it was, we did.

But by the mid-seventies, when the issues of nuclear energy and nuclear

weapons first started getting a lot of attention in the media, it was a

completely different situation. The antinuclear activists, most of whom were

the same people who had previously fought for civil rights and against the

war, now discovered that they had a much tougher job. They'd been doing

exactly the same things they'd done before—organizing, marching, getting

arrested . . . but this time it wasn't working.

It's not that the issue wasn't clear. Very few people (except maybe the big

power companies and their shareholders) really wanted nuclear power. We

didn't want nuclear meltdowns; we didn't want nuclear waste. And we

absolutely didn't want nuclear bombs. We didn't want any of it. We knew it and we were a pretty sizable portion of the population by the time the

antinuclear movement first started coming together.

Of course, not everyone felt the same way about the nuclear issue. Neil Young, for one, is a guy who always likes to swim upstream. When almost

everyone else started attacking nuclear power, Neil wanted to find a way to

go in the other direction, if he possibly could. He's a very contrary guy.

Here's Neil's take on it: "Every time I think of nuclear power, I think of the dream of nuclear power and the energy, the clean energy that it could be. At one point in my life I even thought—of course, this might have been in the

days when I was getting high a lot—I thought that maybe I should have gone

to school and learned all about nuclear physics." Neil is also a very smart guy and he's studied a lot of science, so he knew that if you could produce nuclear power from cold fusion instead of fission, you'd be able to run the

entire eastern seaboard on a teacup full of seawater with absolutely no

radioactive waste. (Unfortunately, cold fusion doesn't exist yet, and unless

Neil does get a degree in nuclear physics, it probably never will.)

Personally, the antinuclear movement made me feel like I'd come home

again. To me it absolutely felt the way it had in the sixties and early

seventies at the civil rights rallies and the moratoriums against the war. But

unlike racism or the war in Vietnam, nuclear power was still only a

theoretical problem to most people. Because of that, it was much harder to

motivate them to try to do something about it. Sure,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.